1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of differentiating and counting erythroblasts with a flow cytometer.
2. Prior Art
Unexamined Published Japanese Patent Application No. 134958/1988 discloses a two-step staining process that uses a hypotonic acidic fluorescent dye solution and a solution that will changes its osmolarity and pH. A blood sample stained with those solutions is loaded in a flow cytometer to obtain signal for fluorescence and side-scattered light and on the basis of those signals, a two-dimensional plot of fluorescence intensity vs the intensity of side-scattered light is constructed, whereby the leukocytes in the sample are classified into five types: lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils and a noise component, respectively.
Unexamined Published Japanese Patent Application No. 134958/1988 does not mention the differentiation and counting of erythroblasts. Erythroblasts are cells ancestral to red corpuscles and they normally occur in the bone marrow but not in circulating blood. However, in certain diseases such as anemia and leukemia, erythroblasts also occur in circulating blood. Therefore, it is of clinical importance to measure erythroblasts.